SHARP POINTS

'It is I,' said the fullback

S

hould editors "correct" quotes? No. Quotes are sacred.

This doesn't mean we need to reproduce every "um," every "er," every
cough, it doesn't mean a reporter's transcription errors can't be
corrected, and it certainly doesn't mean that stories should attempt
to re-create dialect (plenty of literate people pronounce "should have" as
"should of"), but it
does mean that a reader should be able to
watch a TV interview and read the same interview in the newspaper and not
notice discrepancies in word choice.

Before radio and TV, let alone 24-hour cable news and C-SPAN, the lying
journalist could rest assured that very few people would ever catch such
deception. Today, however, it's pretty likely that somewhere someone is
watching on CNN as somebody says, "I ain't saying nothing to you
[bleep]er [bleep]ers," while reading a printed account of the same
statement that says, "I respectfully decline to comment, my good man."
(OK, maybe I'm exaggerating, but you get the point.)

After all, what is the point of quotation marks if not to signal that
what's inside is a verbatim account of what was said?

It is often argued that quoting people accurately is somehow unfair,
that reproducing the little flaws that everyone makes when speaking
"makes them look stupid." Too bad. That's no reason to lie, which is
what you're doing when you put quote marks around a non-quote.

Another problem with worrying about "making people look stupid" is
that it introduces an insidious class calculus: If William Safire
fails to use the subjunctive when he should have, you'll correct
that, but will you do the same in a quote from a football player,
or a welfare mother? You have to decide on a "correct but not too
correct" version of your stylebook to ensure that educated people
don't look uneducated but uneducated people don't look too educated. Once
you've gone this far, why not just make up all of your quotes? (What
a tangled web we weave . . .)

A corollary to the class problem is the problem of cases where
certain editors might want to make people look uneducated, or
at least colorful.
In a feature story on a Southern sheriff's down-home ways, do we want to
impose the sequence of tenses on his yarn about a possum over
yonder by the woodpile? Or how about this:
If a big story were to break on a public official making a hilarious
goof in a speech, wouldn't it be a little unfair to report this in
a publication that essentially pretends nobody else in the
world ever makes a grammatical mistake out loud?

I may sound strident on a lot of other points, but this is one
where I truly believe that people who disagree with me are deranged.
The answer is breathtakingly simple: It's our job to tell the
truth.